Outbound international telephone traffic is routed from the originating domestic switches to the gateway switches, which route the calls to international carriers in the destination country. If a domestic long distance carrier has agreements with more than one International Telecom Operator (ITO) in that country, the gateway switch routes the appropriate amount of outbound traffic to each ITO. The percentage of traffic sent to each ITO is embodied in the contractual agreement between the ITO and the domestic long distance carrier. These allocation percentages are enforced by the gateway switch, which divides the traffic among the ITOs in each country.
Enforcement of the allocation percentages within the gateway switch tables does not provide the required level of accuracy and flexibility to manage the increasingly complex network, services, and agreements. Currently, the gateway switches can not provide load balancing across the entire network of the domestic carrier. In addition, using the gateway switches does not provide the flexibility to efficiently manage different allocation percentages and/or overflow routing by call type.
Currently, to route international calls, the domestic switches recognize the country by the destination address, and utilize switch-based routing tables to determine the proper terminating trunk group to a gateway switch for this particular destination country. If the destination country is a single carrier country, this type of routing is sufficient. However, when a destination country has more than one service carrier, this type of routing does not provide the needed flexibility for proper allocation of the outbound international traffic.
A need therefore exists for a telecommunications system which allocates and routes international calls in accordance with availability of service provisions of an international carrier and an agreement between the long distance carrier and the international carrier.